1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a mover having a plurality of plate-like permanent magnets, an armature through which the mover is passed, and a linear motor configured such that the mover and the armature (stator) are combined.
2. Description of Related Art
In a vertical movement device of a drill used in a borer for an electronic circuit board or the like, or a vertical movement mechanism in a pick-and-place (pick a component and place it at a predetermined position) robot, high-speed movement and high-precision positioning are required. Consequently, a conventional method of converting an output of a rotation motor to horizontal movement (vertical movement) using a ball screw does not meet such requirements because the conventional method is slow in movement speed.
Consequently, for such vertical movement, the use of a linear motor capable of directly generating a horizontal movement output is promoted. There are proposed, as linear motors, various types of configurations each in which a permanent magnet structure having a large number of plate-like permanent magnets arranged therein is used as a mover, an armature having a winding coil to flow the current is used as a stator, and the mover is arranged in the portion of hole of the stator (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-27731, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-287185 and the like). Among conventional linear motors each in which a magnet is used in the mover, the one configured such that a coil of an armature is individually wound around each magnetic pole has problems that the number of coils is increased so that it becomes difficult to reduce the size, a leakage flux is increased so that efficiency as a linear motor is lowered and, accordingly, it becomes difficult to achieve a reduction in size and an increase in output. In order to solve the problems, there is proposed a linear motor using a claw-pole (claw-teeth) armature (e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2005-295708 and the like).